I wanted to read this collection because I loved the artistic concept of Scanlan's previous work, Aug 9--Fog. However, these stories were lacking a theme and they all seemed to fall flat.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD x FSG Originals on April 7, 2020

Stories like Kathryn Scanlan's seem to be in vogue in literary circles. They are praised for being astutely observed; whether the observations are worthwhile seems to be less important than the writer’s ability to capture a moment or sensation, or to illuminate or at least illustrate a shared human experience. Plot and characterization are secondary, indeed unimportant, to stories like these.

This is hardly a new trend. In a couple of recent books, Sam Reese quotes an observation that A.L. Balder made in 1945, when he described the (then) “modern short story” as “plotless, static, fragmentary, amorphous — frequently a mere character sketch or vignette, or a mere reporting of a transient moment, or the capturing of a mood or nuance.” That’s pretty much how I would describe the stories in The Dominant Animal.

I have picked up and put down several story collections in recent years, unable to make it to the end both because the stories seem pointless and because nothing about the way they were written grabbed me. I made it to the end of The Dominant Animal because, although it is packed with stories, each can each be consumed in a minute or two. Many of the stories have an ambiguous meaning. A surgeon who cares about animal rights traps mice that are destroying his expensive cars by using glue boards, inadvertently kills one while trying to free it, and then closes the eyelids of the woman to whom he is relating the story. What’s that all about?

The picnickers in another story eat their hands while waiting for a pig to roast. In her mind, a woman compares baby squirrels to human babies. A man who awakens his neighborhood with a chainsaw every morning is arrested and quickly released, both for reasons unknown. In the title story, a woman disowns a dog that kills her other dog, then goes walking with a man who makes a strange sound. Dying pets and disagreeable men are recurring themes.

Maybe these stories will make more sense to other readers than they did to me. To be fair, I did appreciate a few of the stories. The story I most enjoyed is “Mother’s Teeth,” perhaps because it is slightly longer than the rest. While waiting for her mother’s chemo session to end, a woman eats ice cream and has sex with an elderly man in the locker room of a recreational facility. Later she endures her mother’s criticism, but the ending is happy (in the narrator’s view) because her mother dies.

A story about a woman who brazenly misappropriates another woman’s dog is interesting. So is an ambiguous story about two children who seem to be fending for themselves. A story about a disastrous casino and golfing vacation has something to say about the importance of changing patterns, just like clouds that are “tired of the same old thing.” A story about Scandinavian dieting is amusing. A story about untraining a trained dog would have been amusing but for the darkness that surrounds it.

So that’s about a half dozen of the forty stories in this collection that did anything for me at all. The ratio is just too low to recommend the volume as a whole.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Terrific collection.

Scanlan's writing is spare, yet precise - her stories cut deep into the human condition.

I read Aug 9 - Fog in a sitting and knew I would devour The Dominant Animal. And that, I did. I have already recommended her writing to friends. Can't wait to see what she does next.

This mercurial collection of short stories is infinitely readable. I devoured the whole thing in less than a day. I loved the author's other book Aug 9 - Fog and so had high expectations for this one, I was not disappointed. I think that similar to Aug 9, The Dominant Animal is the sort of book that you could pick up when ever you need a literary or creative shot of energy. Flip to whichever pages your finger happens between and read the short passage that is there. The writing is so tight and fluid, and the stories so creative, bizarre and potent, that you will be inspired to either keep reading or to go off and fulfill your own creative endeavours. Thank you so much to NetGalley and to the publishers for providing me with this ARC. I will be recommending it to everyone I know that enjoys well-written fiction.

"His tolerance for looking at the unattainable was so much lower than mine, which felt boundless, untested. It was the only thing I wanted to see."

Scanlan’s collection casts an errie fog over the ordinary. There are people remembering cold parents who have died and a dog who abandoned love and home for another family. Men with groping, rough hands and a girl whose ‘curiosity often led her into troublesome situations’, and doesn’t seem too worry much over the danger, though she should. A couple who lives in cramped quarters slobbering over the abundance of wealth the affluent take for granted, people trying to sink themselves into death and a mother who watches a family friend with a hawks eye around her daughters.

Threats always lurk, either from within or without, beasts not entirely animal. Human beings are at their worst or alerted to predators in these tales. Some are liars, like the Master Framer and some men will never be rescued, because how can you save someone from what goes on in their own head, as in The Rescued Man.

The Poker was an interesting title, because what do females do but dodge poking and prodding from birth? The mother isn’t allowed to feel her pain, she is ‘greedy’ with her baby girl when protecting her from the arms of a ‘family friend holding her child wrong’, and nothing in the world, not even pills can keep her little girls safe from the violence beyond the door and the world’s flippant response to a woman’s reaction to insults and injury. In Mother’s Teeth a woman cares for her needy, sick mother, though really after her childhood owes her nothing.

As in The Candidate, a person is an animal among the domesticated of our species. Sometimes even a family dog can have more pedigree, ‘expensive heritage’ than us, and we are the sticky, messy animal never to be as sleek and refined as others.

The stories are both ordinary and strange, and the people in the tales are just trying to ‘live’. Oh, it hurt, something I did nearly cost you your life, well just like the woman in The Poker was told, ‘You survived didn’t you?’ As if that’s enough. My favorites were The Poker and The Rescued Man, in fact I the latter would make an interesting novel. I didn’t love all of them, but Kathryn Scanlan excels is in digging through the hum of the average, ordinary days and it’s people; sometimes finding things to abhor about them or admire.

Publication Date: April 7, 2020

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

MCD x FSG Originals

I hadn't read any of Scanlan's work before this, but I loved the cover and really enjoy short story collections so I thought I would give it a shot. Though I was captivated by a handful of these stories, a lot of them fell flat for me. I admire her precision and how she can start to make a story come alive, even with no names or identifiers of any kind, but these types of stories are not my favorite. Some I felt as if I wasn't fully understanding them, like they were about something other than what I was imagining in my head. And that's okay - I think that her work is no doubt brilliant - it is just not the kind of thing that I can say I love fully. I think that there are a lot of people who will rave about this collection, and it wholeheartedly deserves the praise it receives.

Every once in a while I like to pick up a book that may be out of my wheelhouse. Something that just might challenge my typical reading experience. The Dominant Animal seemed like just the book to scratch that itch. First of all it's a book of short stories which I'm not typically a fan of. This in and of itself became challenge number one. The short stories contained within were of the 2 and 3 page variety so a lot is packed into 140 pages but ultimately I felt as if I haven't read anything at all. There wasn't much to be gained or rewarded for upon completion. I'm all for experimentation but there has to be something for me to chew on. Something for me to contemplate but these stories mostly just left me scratching my head and wondering what the hell I'm missing.

In all fairness this was not the proper book for me and I knew that and yet requested it anyhow. I'm not going to knock the author because she clearly thinks outside the box and the writing could be mesmerizing at times even while being wholly depressing. I, personally, wouldn't recommend this but other reviewers found far more meaning than I did so if you're interested in something completely different then by all means give this one a shot. For me though .... 2 stars!

Thank you to NetGalley and MCD X FSG Originals for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Depicting cruelty is not daring or interesting per se, it takes a writer like Ottessa Moshfegh or - all hail the king! - Cormac McCarthy to turn violence and disgust into poetry. Otherwise, cruelty as one of the most primitive human impulses is just boring, and unfortunately, this collection of short stories is a case in point. The slim volume, 160 pages short, contains 40 stories, many of them not more than a scene or an impression. All texts are dire and give the impression that the point of the composition is to capture the depressing randomness of life, and this also means that the stories lack any meaningful build-up or resolution. Employing short, clear sentences, Scanlan successfully avoids anything resembling a lyrical voice or an immersive reading experience.

So yes, you could call that disregard for narrative conventions and readerly expectations daring, but to read one story after the other that throws pointless twists and turns at you while soberly portraying cruelty and indifference is just tedious. The publisher is correct, these stories are "merciless", but have I really felt "unsettled" or even "disturbed"? Nope, mainly, I felt annoyed, because this book is trying so hard to be edgy, but in all its bleakness, it's mainly just bland. It's not unsettling, because the detached depiction of cruelty has no heart - it's cynical, and being a cynic is not only very easy, it also makes for extremely boring company, and this also goes for texts. The depiction of cruelty is only brave when an author dares to feel the pain and to inflict it on her readers.

Many of the stories do meditate on dominance, often referring to dogs - but it has long been established that a pack of dogs does NOT operate on static systems of order and dominance, because dogs as social animals rely on alternating ranks and cooperation depending on the tasks at hand. Of course this isn't a scientific book about the nature of dogs, but that the basic metaphor of the collection is nonsense points at the larger problem: This random assortion of various instances of human cruelty and indifference stands for nothing, there is no deeper truth or meaning behind it, it's one-dimensional and lazy. It's just a failed attempt to be wild and adventurous, but there's no courage in cynical heartlessness.